A story that my parents like to relate to tell people about is when I was a small child living in Vietnam. Every morning I would wake up and go to the market and go to different stalls. I would wait until they opened up and would wait for food. When they gave me food, if they did not add chili and make it spicy, I would refuse to eat it and wait until they eventually surrendered. For obvious reasons they did not want to give it to a child and were hesitant about it. It amuses me that spicy food is something that I have always loved. At the end of each day they would go back and pay everyone that I ate at. Food is cheap at the markets and when I see photos of what it is like now, I wonder what it was like back when I was a child. I am not sure how safe it was for a kid less than 3 years old to wander around by themselves. The community at the time fed me and had faith that my parents would come back later and pay for the food. They had trust that my parents would always pay. I have that relationship with several stores in Sudbury where my kids could go in buy things and tell the staff that I would be back later to pay. They would not hesitate to allow the kids to get what they wanted.
Today I went for some bloodwork and it was probably one of the only times in the last couple of months that it was painful. Every other instance was quite pleasant, but not today. I thought that I was just numb to it and could not feel it, Today proved me wrong. The person who did it kind of knew that she was digging and apologized but it sucked quite a lot. I am pretty sure that I am going to have some bruising as well. Right now I can still feel it and it hurts a bit. My hydration levels have been high and you can clearly see the veins in my arm so I think that it was more of her technique then anything. I have had a craving for an ice cap from Tim Horton’s for a while but decided to come home and make an iced coffee instead. I do enjoy the iced coffees that we make at home. I had a double shot of 2oz espresso, some heavy cream and ice. I have stopped putting sugar into my coffee because I can not taste it at all, and it mutes the flavour of the coffee. Last night Melanie and I setup my monitors upstairs to get them out of the way, and I now have my 5 monitor setup in a convenient location in the dining room. I did miss it terribly and did not realize how much I loved it.
I am sleeping much further into the night now compared to before. Today I was up at 5am as I had to have a bathroom break and then decided to stay up and spend money. Today is prime day and a bunch of things were on sale that I was interested in. I wanted to improve our camera coverage of the flood area in the backyard and purchased a series of cameras that will allow for continuous recording of everything along with large enough hard drives to store all of this information. The city came by today and they removed the existing snow fences and said that they would change out the grate to prevent it from clogging up as much as well as installing some fences up. Our neighbour has recorded the water and showed it to the team and the manager and I do not think that they had expected that. If it happens again I will have enough cameras to really highlight the issue. My appetite today has been pretty good and I have eaten frequently throughout the day fairly well. My weight has stablized at a higher level and fluctuates up and down at that level so I am not sure how much of ascites build up I have. Right now I am not struggling with any eating and I do not notice much swelling. I will be seeing one of my doctors tomorrow so I will see how that goes.
Quoc Hao